


off the vale, stand revealed, bring it on, break the seal

by CharismaticEnticer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: 5 Times, Air Eye Movement and Gooey stuff inside, Blood and Gore, Breakfast, Canonical Character Death, Carlos is a Good Boyfriend, Cecil is a Good Soul, Choking, Consensual Kink, Consensual Night Vale, Episode: e019 The Sandstorm, Episode: e033 Cassette, Episode: e039 The Woman from Italy, Gen, Hard and Soft Limits, M/M, Metallica - Freeform, Night Vale's variant on PTSD, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Spoilers, Strangulation, The Weather (Welcome to Night Vale), They are both good CHARACTERS and I love them to pieces, Writing everyone except Cecil is hard for me, and honestly I even struggle with him, or Presumed Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 21:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1319245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharismaticEnticer/pseuds/CharismaticEnticer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil Palmer has choked, in reality or by proxy, six times. Once, it cost him dear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	off the vale, stand revealed, bring it on, break the seal

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, so this is probably the worst timing in the world...
> 
> I made the connection between all these choking incidents in Cecil's life a while back, and this is my way of putting the pieces together. Hopefully, future episodes will not rebuff it quite as thoroughly as Identity has now been rebuked by Condos' existence. 
> 
> For reference, this is a headshot of my Cecil, in adult form. Since the teenhood incident, his eyes have been like this; the hair was a recent development.  
> 
> 
> As a quick and minor request: once you have finished this fic, and if you enjoyed what you read, could you please check out some of my other works? Most of them are in a pretty obscure fandom, but in the rare event that one of you has played (for free) the game they're for in the past, they need some more love. 
> 
> Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Commonplace Books, and is presumably © Joseph Fink. No disrespect is meant to Cecil Baldwin. The title comes from “Bad Seed”, © Metallica, with one deliberate spelling variation; there's also a few lyrics from “The Judas Kiss” by the same band in the body of the fic.

With a breath deep enough to fill up all the cracks in his lungs, but not so deep as to set them aflame, Cecil Palmer steps through the gate between the outside world and Night Vale High School, two months, two weeks, and two hours late.

The grounds look empty, unsurprisingly; the landscape does much of the talking where its occupants cannot. Most of the leaves on the few trees that dot the area have turned the colours of particularly vibrant sunsets, and dipped onto the ground in a further attempt to copy them – except, of course, for those on that one horse chestnut that's always a couple of seasons ahead of those around it, which indulge themselves in its muted pink flowers instead. (He's always loved eating his lunch under that one.) The building itself stands as firm as ever, not changing angles during his approach the way its elementary equivalent would.

He passes the football field, stopping when he catches a faint pulse through its chain-link fencing. The specter is still there – not a Hooded Figure, but reminiscent of one, navy and gray as the gravelly sky above it. Is it looking at him? Part of him hopes not; now that he's fifteen, he's more likely to be one of its targets. Another part hopes, if it is, that he remembered in the panicked rush to get himself here with no parent and no car to throw his pistol in with the other things in his bag. He's never been sure if it would even work on it, but it's better to be prepared than not.

It's not strictly usual for him to be this late in coming back to school in the first place. But, well, Cecil hasn't had much of a usual summer this year, has he?

...Not that he can remember much of what went on in it. He knows he added another year of survival to under his belt at the tail end of last term. He knows he's spent some time interning at the Community Radio he's been drawn to, magnetically, from a very young age – knows nothing of what occurred, but is pretty sure he did based on the plastic “Cecil: NVCR Intern” badge and the letter from Leonard Burton, perfectly preserved and saying simply “Congratulations” in red ink, on his desk at home. He can also tell, given that she hasn't been here to wake him up since he got his awareness back, that _something's_ happened to his Mom, and it makes his heart twist to an odd angle to think of what that could be.

All else from June to now, November, is a void, a blur of blank spots and the passing of days into themselves. It cuts into him as the passing wind does to his cheek, and the cold wires into his fingers, laced through the holes. One day, once everything's settled down, he'll have to approach Leonard again if he's brave enough, map out what he knows, and try to make sense of it...

But – he remembers as he notices his watch – he can't do that right now. He'll be thrown under a whole different void for detention if he doesn't get a move on.

He _has five months, lost.  
_ He _has two months, two days, two hours, to catch up.  
_ He _has two more chances to make_ his _life what_ he _thinks it should be... though_ he _does not know that yet._

The trek to his locker, assigned when he got here and unchanging since, is fuller of reassuring life; students and teachers slip through the tight corridors in ones, twos and other clumps, like cells in the veins, the vibrant to his de-oxygenated. The bell must have just rung to let them all out, and that in turn means he's got fifteen minutes to gather himself and his stuff before tenth grade Transmigration Studies. He steels himself by shedding his rucksack for use as a fabric shield and somehow barges his way through the crowds, the usual creed in his head: be strong in being small.

By the time he does get to his destination and starts fumbling in all of his tattered coat pockets for wherever the hell he put the key to it, the beginnings of a headache have begun to stir under his right temple. He winces, it grates. Come to think of it, he's been getting those often lately, his vision splotching black in the distance as a result. Masters, he doesn't need to go blind on top of everything else happening right -

“Ceec?!”

A familiar cry coming from somewhere to the right lifts the tension from him straight away, and a smile along with it. It doesn't take long for its owner to follow over and around in a honey-and-green blur, and all the things he's holding clatter down as Earl – his best friend since, like, forever – sweeps him up in one of his emergency hugs.

“Oh my god, Ceec, I thought it was you! Juanita kept saying you'd come back today but we didn't believe her cus we Shouldn't Just Take Psychics At Their Word but she insisted you would and here you are and -! Shit, don't **you** look different,” he interrupts himself, grounding the pair of them at last, part of him not letting go. “Like, have you even slept since – and what's up with your eye?”

Cecil is about to lie that he doesn't feel any different, but Earl quickly starts the conversation again without him. That, too, has been a frequent thing since getting his awareness back, adults and peers all falling into the same trap of talking over the teenage selves they see in him.

“Never mind, forget I asked. Where the hell have you **been**? You've missed out on so much, like, Mr Peters's started his wood shop class again, though we've been making nothing but strange oak doors and old picture frames this time; shed's full of them. And Boleslaus was _such_ a racist jackass last week – I mean, like that's new, but more so than usual, you know? Oh! AndSteve Carlsberg's catching up to me at last, he's got this huge growth spurt going, Cecil, you wouldn't believe-”

“Someone call me?”

The crowd, indifferent to the chatterbox, is pulled apart again and the Carlsberg in question steps through. ...Well, he _thinks_ it's the Carlsberg he knew from years of tentative companionship. The face looks like Steve, and the voice is clearly Steve, and context would imply that it _is_ Steve, but – Earl was right, he's far taller than he has any right to be now, nigh on gangly enough to smack his head into the ceiling if he's not careful.

“Yeah, Cecil's back!”

“I can see that, short stuff, I'm not dumb,” the newcomer scoffs.

Earl rolls his eyes at the obvious nickname, but is blocked off by yet more hands pulling Cecil along before he can return the gesture. (Why is everyone so touchy feely with him today? Surely he wasn't that missed.)

“Long time no see, Palmer! Glad you're back,” says Steve, still towering above him. He's always been the more taciturn of the two, and today is clearly no exception. “You've got a backlog of like fifty noogies building up. Let's see if I can squeeze 'em in before class, huh?” And before he can get permission, gravity's changing and the usual holding-arm's around his neck--

**and it's crushing him hurting him cutting him off cutting it all off muscles pushing into pulse slowing stemming stopping no room to breathe too close too soon get free of the flic–**

“No no stop-- no – don't!”

Once he's broken out of the hold, closing off against the lockers and cowering, a fake silence lights on them for a second, the kind that would be absolute if it wasn't swallowed by the humming and buzzing of people continuing with their lives, oblivious to this. By the buzzing of Cecil's fear, of his life, of his voice, far different from what it was. What once might have come out as a squeak is now a bassline, albeit filtered in a repressed strain.

It's the first chance he's had to talk since summer.

Both witness and aggressor fight for the chance to break it, with their own confused and flustered questions. Earl's wondering if 'puberty got to you too', from what he can tell, while Steve's more concerned that 'you didn't mind that shit before why're you freaking out now'.

He can respond to neither of them. All he does is shake his head and repeat his last warning, like it's the only word he knows. “ **Don't.** ”

And – for all of Steve's future (and increasingly more frequent) transgressions across the spectrum of friendship, indifference, and hate – he never does.

 

 _when the fear abducts your tongue  
_ _when the fire's dead and gone_

 

Time flows. Cecil grows. Both of these events occur near-simultaneously, in their own nebulous fashion.

High school ends and college flies by. He walks through Europe's many secrets and walks back to get a BA in Radio. His takeover is assured by then, Leonard having mysteriously vanished, but every little helps; besides, whatever would make his Mom proud of him, right? He takes up the headphones and mantle, his voice fitting better this time, as a pair of new shoes would loosen with every wear. Financial troubles are discussed loudly with a rep from the City Council on jagged cliffs, surrounded by deafening winds that threaten to catapult him to the rocks below, and he downgrades from the old house to an apartment building. Steve and Earl are not forgotten, just... re-relegated.

The whole process takes longer and shorter than he would have expected it to, and he emerges at the end of it to a bright June morning, the sun sliding in through an open window and covertly ignoring the grime-encrusted dishes that dominate the kitchen sink in spires and skyscrapers. Cecil Palmer is now Voice of Night Vale in the mandatory capital letters, groggy in a dressing gown from a pretty rough night of enduring the chanting in Svitzese from upstairs, and (from what he can gather from the evidence) twenty-five, his birthday having passed over without fanfare a week and a day before this one.

In terms of height and limbs and physical things, he has stopped growing. But his knowledge of the world, and the way he sees it, expand further with each step he takes, he thinks.

...or rather, he **would** , were he awake enough right now to look back on it. As it is, it's far too early for metaphorical time travel, or even metaphors at all, so he's really shuffling too loudly through the many many cans in the cupboards and thinking more along the lines of: _Ugh, where's coffee when you need it?_

He does find it eventually. The box shows up inside a whole lettuce in the depths of the fridge, cracking like a knee joint as he has to pull it apart. Rather than waste a good vegetable, he sets it aside for his dinnertime sandwich, which in turn helps him decide on toast for breakfast. What could go wrong with toast? By the time he and his meal are at the table, bread lightly burnt with lashings of butter and the fourth sip of a slightly grassy cup of coffee going into his system, he's feeling a lot more alert. Perhaps even aware enough to notice the Sheriff's Secret Police making their rounds through others' introspection, if they happen to be doing so right now.

“Not that they **are** ,” he says sternly to no one in particular. “You promised we'd have a week off from this.”

There's a guilty rustling outside, and the no one seems to vanish as quickly as it arrived.

...Well, with all that aside: he can tell that today's going to be a pretty good day, all things considered! He's never been able to figure out just **how** he knows the quality of these things before he steps into them, but it is what it is. The sky's at a decent angle compared to its solitary eye; no part of his form has changed in the night; and since he already had a fit of emotional-aura bleedover yesterday, there's less chance of him needing his special glasses today. Plus, his usual routine of drink, food, radio show is as intact as it ever was. That's something nothing could ever shake.

Hm. He'd better get cracking on that toast if he wants that to stay true. The spread is starting to sink into its textured surface. So he takes a decently-sized bite from its corner, chews, relishes the taste of it on his tongue with a hum, and uses that same slab of slick wet meat to flick it to the back of his throat.

Where it sticks in his windpipe.

He stills, spasms, realizes he can't swallow, can't breathe. His lungs try to pick up the pace, to panic or to compensate, but nothing pushes through the lukewarm slab piercing him from side to side of vulnerable neck, hack hack, needs hands to cover it up protect it, they do, pound pound rescue himself, chair scraping on the floor backwards nearly over. It grazes hatefully against the inside of his Adam's apple, razor, iron wool, claws slicing open another mouth to repl--

With one mighty thump and a gasp, the offending slice is dislodged, landing with a gross splat on the unvarnished table. The edge of it is in his fingers before he realizes it, and he expands, deflates, grateful for every new breath moving into him first fast then slow, steady, calm. Calm.

This is easy enough, but five minutes on, he hasn't moved from that position. Not majorly, anyway; he can feel himself trembling, feet quaking on the too-cold floor. His neck still rasps with a phantom danger. The room spins. His wrists, swamped by his sleep attire, feel like wet wood, like they'll snap at any second from the strain.

Half of him thinks this isn't what the Council would define as 'normal'.

 _...Come on, Cecil, don't be pathetic._ He's battled far more dangerous things in the past; why would this specific thing choose to shake him up this much? Hell, he has worse to face from Station Management, should he be late.

This thought springs him up from his unfinished breakfast and to his bedroom to get dressed and another drink. Unsteadily, mind, and he flinches away from putting on his tie, but it's the principle of the thing.

A few hours on, when he's perched delicately on the old recording chair, pulling his town into the cozy hug of routine and relay, he's given an opening to bring up the incident. Not the fight for composure afterwards - in such a summer as this, he doesn't think they'd be sympathetic to that. Only that its trigger happened at all. He wouldn't have much hope of not doing it; the topic is on Lucy Gutierrez's recovery from a similar problem, and her life partner's research on it.

“...unfortunately, Hannah's attempts to find meaning in it from Dr Bachman's Near-Death-Experience Dictionary are still unfruitful,” he informs his town. “While the book **does** have sections on heatstroke or skin cancer, there's nothing about humans almost melting into boneless formless puddles, which **really** ought to be addressed in the next edition, if you ask me.

“... Actually, Listeners, perhaps I'm not the best person to judge. I ran shy of the scythe of Death myself, earlier this morning. Piece of toast down the wrong hole. You know how it is.”

The memory of it still chills him to the bone and beyond for a reason he cannot place, but he carries on. Why worry the public?

“And when I looked it up in my own copy of the dictionary, it did in fact have a very specific entry for it. Apparently, nearly choking on toast, particularly the buttered kind, is a sign that _something is coming_. The book knows not when, or refuses to say, but does think that it could potentially change my life in ways both vast and inconsequential.

“Well, whether that change comes today, or five years from now, I will have no choice but to face it when it does. Come at me, whatever you are,” he orders into the microphone, knowing that it will not obey. “Come at me so that I can find meaning in you. And may Lucy find meaning in her almost slipping, literally, out of this world.

“And may **you** all find meaning... in this. [The weather.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIWn7SeGlUw)”

Cecil doesn't have long to wait. A fleet of cars stuffed to the brim with official scientists pulls into town the next day.

 

 _twisting of the tourniquet  
_ _when the pieces never fit_

 

"-the person you used to be, once upon a time," he concludes five months later, the chair and world around him fixed in place. Between stories, he peers through the backlit glass again to see if any of those self-same scientists have come back from their earlier visit to the station. He can't not slump when he sees they haven't. More's the pity; not only do they provide important information for eager Listeners to know, such as the significance of wheat and/or its by-products, but even when they don't, he quite likes those scientists.

...Well, he **does**. Just because the leader of them all is so terribly exquisite and swept up and beautiful in how he looks when he's bewildered, perplexed, thrilled, in a way that makes his soul hurt, doesn't mean he's not allowed to be friendly to the other ones too.

No matter. Waiting for visitors isn't getting the news out to the people any faster. He moves on to the City Council's decree against counterfeit bloodstones, trying his best to keep his mind entirely on what his notes, inked with peanut butter this time, tell him to say. It doesn't work as well as it ought to.

Science has been a real fixture in Night Vale in recent weeks, hasn't it? Just as Carlos keeps claiming that his town's challenging every notion he thought he'd had about how things work, he and his team have been giving theirs new context. Like the formation of the kind of cloud that doesn't constantly shift in hue, for instance – he's been doing his research and has some great facts about them added to the backlog for the Fun Fact Science Corner. Hell, the fact that a Fun Fact Science Corner now exists at all is pretty spectacular! The first subtle shift in programming for quite some time, all thanks to the company from outside.

Still, he's not sure he wants to know **all** of what they have to teach. At one point, they offered to show him through a series of laser set-ups how mirrors work; he politely turned that down. He's never trusted mirrors. And nor, judging by the post-it simply saying “alternate NV wiped out”, should anyone else.

...Gah, he can't help it! Once he's reached the end of that bulletin, he simply _has_ to check outside the recording booth one more time to see if they're back yet. If they've snuck in while he wasn't looking, it'd be rude not to acknowledge them.

When he does, though, he first sees that outside has disappeared. All of the station, except for his trusty room (a satellite to its planet), is steeped in pitch black, lit by no electricity or sun. The only being he can see on the surface is himself, reflected back at him, and he

 _A miserable creature, defiant, stubborn  
_ _Insides working and churning while fraying like ribbons  
_ _A vessel, a_ Host _, a flickering behind  
_ He _should not see this_ **We _should not be alive_**

turns into a beep that tears up his whole body, even through the unexplained crushing in an all-too-dangerous place, and he's on his knees, the ground, the chair having catapulted itself into a corner, or it may be a ceiling.

It's all a blur of darkness and absence of darkness now. The only stars are the blades, bitter and disgorging. Interference crackles in the equipment, the speaker, sight, sound, pain. He's a plaything for the cosmos, and it's tearing his head off.

“Oh dear--! I – apologize, Listeners,” he hears someone say, nowhere and everywhere. Is it him? Sounds like him, but it can't be. It's a struggle for him to even cry for help. Those words form more shrapnel before they can escape, while others resound in their stead.

“We at – Night Vale Community Radio are experiencing the following _tech—_ nical problems.”

It burns to move. The holes are gaping wider in his body. They swallow him up.

“The need for air...” No breath, no life.

“Eye movement...” No closing, no escape from the fate that meets him.

“And gooey stuff inside.” No heart to beat. No strength.

“Please... stand **by.** ”

The plates shift, and he falls. There's a really loud sound of crumpling next to his ear, like the collapse of a massive work in progress, barely begun.

And then the tone reverberates again, from toes to head, and the assault on his body is suddenly gone, pretending it never was.

Strength, heart, blinking light, life, **breath**. Not sight, not yet that, still only tattering edges and the too-old carpet he's landed on, but all else rumbles anew, pounding and whirring and audibly inhaling exhaling, almost too loudly now, too fast, not enough. Spinning heads and numb minds, chipped, salt water leaking from the botched repair.

_In, out. One. Two. Three. Keep breathing. Relish it. Six. Professional. Eight._

He's prone on the floor, unable to rise and do much else but count his breaths until they steady out, for - he doesn't even know how long. When he does manage to find his feet and stand up too quickly, the rush to the brain blots out the scientists waving clipboards feverishly at him, awash in the light.

The [On Air] sign is as red as ever when it comes back, contemplating the empty space. It's a welcome thought.

“...Thank you,” he says at last to dead air, moving slowly back to his abandoned seat, surprised by how calm he sounds. “These problems have been corrected.”

When the problem with the wheat has been told and told again and they all go to hover a few minutes after, he is still silently crying.

 

 _when the storm has blacked your sky  
_ _intuition crucify_

  
The crouching creature from the photo, with void in his eyes and dropped sunglasses held askew and so much more searing blood in the flesh, turns up the plasters that cover the corners of his mouth and says “Hello there, friend!”

Beyond what passes for boundaries in the vortex, the raging sand is faint but audible. Even if he could get out in a way that didn't mean rushing back to certain death or the place where morals apparently go to do the same, that terrible torrent alone would trap him in here with this... this whatever, **whoever** it is that's approaching him now, all limbs and ill-suppressed highs and smiles that aren't. Smiles that drip, blotch, at their ends. Smiles that send something cold and awful running through him, along his own face and down to his thyroid, a dark and memory-bidden grin of improbable placement, but he can't dwell on that here, why is he dwelling, _I've got to get back home--!_

Too late. While consumed in his thoughts and his fear, the devil has already set itself upon him.

He hurls it aside before it can sink its teeth in and tries to run for the relative safety of Night Vale, but it comes back tenfold, pinning him to the semblance of ground, like a cactus against his cheek. He tries to break his flailing arms free and crawl out from underneath his reflection; that spider of escape is quickly squashed with hands, knees, pressure points, almost too many for the source. Arms and legs alike are twisted, painfully, towards the edge of space-time, and the man's grotesque features are so close now, even the arch of his nose so much like his own, and yet off in a way he can't pick up on from this precarious place.

His pulse rings, and he hopes the other cannot hear it. Given his clothes and aura, swathed entirely in red and black, it would be no deterrent.

“Why so shy, doppelganger?” it chuckles above him, too lightly for what's happening here. “There's nothing to be scared of. I'm just trying to get to know you, and what better way than through a hug?”

The matching hands are pulling down from where they hold his as it talks, and flicker dangerously onto his throat. They grip before he can gurgle out a retort. Too tight, too slowly. It's done this before...

“C'mon. Just one hug - ” it rasps, the nails dig in -

_\- memories pour through the yawning scars they leave – the attacker blurs and morphs into Steve, a snake, a moonlighted deity – close to death then, closer now – **no –** why do they always go for the voice it's too much – he's had **enough** of choking to last him three lifetimes –_

\- “then you can go.”

Fright, swirling through his system, bubbles and boils over into a new rage, and Cecil's muscles scream into a surprisingly strong right hook.

The other is forced to let go as he keels over; neither, though, let up. What was once an assault is now him full-on fighting for his safety, and that of his town caught in its own battles. Black eyes turn blacker, scratches blaze their skins, there's a thud on someone's leg that feels like it'll turn a myriad of colours later. All the while, their throats are bared, arched, vibrating with grunts of pain, sickeningly vulnerable. It reaches for his again and again but never will it get him, no more no more _no more,_ too much at risk, too much to lose, he has to survive, he has to grab the threat by the rapidly beating heart and squeeze until it stops cold--

Something crackles in the space between them, and he realizes with a start that he's got the man in a choke hold himself. His face is paling, the gasps shallower, and yet the smile remains, as though it were the remnants of his own.

A thought occurs, bringing with it bile and venom through the sand-scorched mind and on the tongue: if he applies just a little more pressure, the beast will be dead.

 _Do it,_ responds something in his gut. _He tried to kill you. If you leave him alive, he could come for you again, for all that you hold dear. If the storm outside doesn't get him anyway, you might as well. Do it._

Something else protests. It flares up behind the eyes, tells it into his teeth. _But if we left him for dead,_ it snarls, _we would be no better than if the double had succeeded, surely?_

He neither lets go, nor tightens, and ignores the voices warring in his head. The shadows of the spiral bend around the pair, lightening, darkening, renewing again. It carries on like this until he reaches the true answer.

Then he pulls away, stands up, and follows the nebulous path home, leaving the man to do the same.

He doesn't tell his Listeners everything when he gets back, though he allows some pieces of the meeting to slip through. There are some hypocrisies in the lives of those that influence us that are best left kept secret. This includes (almost, if not entirely) murdering oneself.

 

 _internalize and decimate  
_ _patronize and complicate_

 

“So. Kinks. How do you wanna go about this?” asks his boyfriend Carlos – so many days now of ascribing that word to him, and it never loses its luster – at the tail-end of a mouthful of homemade veggie nut burger. “You want me to just throw out what I like, and you give a yeah or no? I mean, scientifically, that wouldn't be a good way to approach it, but then we're both getting what we want, and we're not exactly--”

“No no, that's, that's great! Good idea.” Cecil can't help but smile, staring at the excitable hands of the wonderful man in front of him, which are now pulling up a comfortably-sized piece of paper from the side of the kitchen table that smells faintly of ketchup.

“Okay. I've got a list made up already. These aren't in any order, 'cept the one I thought about them in. So it's gonna be kind of erratic and... 'hem.” Is that a blush crossing those delicious cheeks of his? “So, for _some_ reason the first thing I've got down here,” he taps the paper and his eyes glint, “is 'voice kink'. You know, hearing dirty talk, worship, that kind of thing. Can't think why, can you, Cecil?”

“Nope, simply can't imagine.” He goes along with the good-natured ribbing. “Now, for me to indulge myself in the delectable tones of **your** rich voice I can understand, but _mine_?”

That is definitely a flustered Carlos in front of him now. “Oh, stop it. My voice isn't rich. At least not yet.”

“What?”

“Anyway, I'll take it that's a yes to a voice thing?” This is met with a nod, and a pretty poor hiding of the spring in his soles too.

Part of him thinks it's stupid to get this giddy over something like this. After all, he's already held his beautiful scientist close enough to trace a breath's laboured path from inside to out a few times – twice as an alternative to a certain milestone, once as a coda, and once to soothe him from a toothache pulsing so much with pain and anger that Carlos could no longer make sense of it. (On one hand, this meant quiet chewing, if any; on the other, anything that threatens a scientist's ability to think is a threat and should be destroyed or pushed out at all costs.)

...But still – he's negotiating their kinks. Their hard and soft limits. With _Carlos_. Even four months before, he wouldn't have thought they'd get this far. Another key point in a relationship reached, a home-cooked meal from his boyfriend, the disappearance of the dreaded mountain and all it entailed... What could be better?

“Um. I've got 'exhibitionism' down next, which I suppose is just an extension of--”

It just got better. “ **Yes!** ”he cries, almost slamming the table. “ **Yes.** That's a-- absolutely, yes! That is _so much_ my thing, Carlos, you don't even know.”

“Yeah, I know, but I mean, _real_ exhibitionism. Like, actually in earshot of people, maybe in a storage cupboard or, say, at your station--”

“While I'm on air?! Yeah, that's what I meant. ...That _is_ what you meant, right?”

Fortunately, it seems to be: “Oh thank god, I'm not the only one of us that's been dreaming about that!” The two, while darting to make eye contact again, realize they've neglected their dinner, so take another mouthful (doing that cute thing they've been doing a lot lately and trying to trick each other into biting first) before it picks back up. “Obviously, we'd have to establish some kind of signal if we were to give this a go, though. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to assume you wanted me to do it, and then... you didn't.”

Oh, caring considerate Carlos... A few ideas flit through his mind, with varying degrees of subtlety, before he settles on one. “How about, if I say the words 'radio activity',” he's sure to emphasize the space, “that's a yes? That sounds sufficiently science-y.”

“Yeah, that works! And if you don't say it, I'll back off. Deal?”

“It's a deal.” His gaze goes back to the held paper. “But we're digressing. You've got a list to finish.”

“Ah, yes, thanks. Okay. How do you feel about pain? You know, during the act. More than the standard minuscule amounts of pain we'd usually get from it.”

Now his scientist is starting to lose him. “What, you mean like rough sex?”

“Sort of – it's more specific to certain parts. Non-erogenous areas. So in this case there'd be, let's see – biting, hair pulling, you've tried that a bit already, maybe dabbling a bit in erotic asphyxiation...”

A cold fog creeps up onto Cecil from behind upon that final word, stifling. Its all-consuming approach is a cross to bear, one he really hoped wouldn't have to come up again, and a pretty good indicator of what it meant.

“Asphyxiation?” he asks anyway.

“Breath control, essentially. It wouldn't be enough to kill anyone, it just supposedly increases the pleasure from it. You'd just have to put your hand on my neck just here, see?” A transition from table to under the chin, pushing into the stubbled arc of his throat. Rivets form where the fingertips press harder...

_...harder into his own, harder than they have any right to, hard enough to bring so much surging back, so much quicker than before..._

“No! No, Carlos, I.” The shake of the head is vehement, blurring out the dangerous sight. “I couldn't- no. That, no. Never.”

“So that's a hard limit?”

“No – yes. It's. It's a hard limit, Carlos.”

“Okay, that's fine. I don't want to push you into any of this. If I did I'd look like a bit of an asshole, and scientifically speaking once you look like a **bit** of an asshole the chances of becoming a **lot** of an asshole rise by...”

Cecil is no longer listening. He's too caught on the downward slope of his boyfriend's gaze, of the hint of disappointment he could have sworn he heard folded into the words. Damnit. He's let Carlos down, he promised himself tonight that he wouldn't but he has. Of _course_ Carlos didn't know. How could he have known? His own fault for not saying so sooner...

The breath is stale in the air now, puncturing his insides. The abandoned burger on his plate, so appetizing before, doesn't stir his stomach anymore. What bits of it he has eaten now taste of wallpaper paste, dead on re-arrival.

“...Cecil?” By some miracle, Carlos hasn't left while talking. He's staring at him now, pupils widening with concern.

“Yeah?”

“You're trembling, Cecil. Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

The lie is too obvious, for the other doesn't reply. Further disappointment. It might be better, this time, to tell the truth. Being with Carlos has taught him a few things he never expected to learn, and that it's sometimes important to feel what he would have once called pathetic is among them.

“...It's getting kind of hard to-” he starts before it halts him, proving his point. “My. My lungs hurt. ...Can we save this for another time, dear Carlos?”

There's a halter, a beat of two hearts together, and then he's around him, sweeping in a tight hug, so much comfort at once. “Oh god Cecil I'm so sorry I swear I wouldn't have brought it up if I'd known you'd be triggered by this shit damnit I'm sorry--!”

He kisses the top of Carlos's rumpled worrisome head to let him know it's nowhere near his fault.

 

 _followed you from dawn of time_  
 _whispered thoughts into your mind_  
 _watched your towers hit the ground_  
 _lured the children never found  
_ _helped your kings abuse their crown_

 

A month flies by, quicker than the amber-shaded helicopters that begin to patrol the skies in the stead of the SSP. Triangle-laden leaflets come pouring in, and unexpectedly, control of the radio station is transferred over to a new benefactor, leaving Cecil hand-tied, confused, and worrying himself sick about Old Woman Josie.

The tapes are found in a box in a closet. Each one is marked with the same impersonal label, in all caps, ink rancid from the time pens were legal. “CECIL RADIO TEST, AGE 15”. There's also different coloured stickers on the ends of the whites, all different. 'Start', 'House', 'Home', 'End'.

He takes them to work, befuddled by their very existence against everything he remembers from when he was a teen. Using up radio time on what is admittedly a slow news day, he pops the first tape in and, with a doubting finger, presses Play.

It is a very different Cecil that hears the last of them, of his younger self, cut off automatically. That closes the show. That remains glued to his chair long after the town is bid a Good Night, staring at the crushed remains of it.

...No matter how hard he squeezed the plastic and polyester, to break apart the before from his all-too-present now, the fact remains that it contained what it did. The sounds from it play, replay, from seconds ago. His youthful self, on a higher lilt, idolizing a very different radio voice to the one he's always known. The roar of noise when singing. The buzzes and pops in the background, growing steadily closer.

The – and it makes him close up to think it – the strangulation. The petering out of a living breathing soul. The crumpling onto the front hall's carpet, like the collapse of a massive work in progress. Barely begun.

He heard himself die. There's no way around that.

Yes there is. It can't be true.  
It **must** be true.  
There's too many contradictions.  
It explains so much else.  
He's breathing right now.  
It's a shallow act.  
He'd remember it if it were true.  
Death helps one forget.

 **He's alive!!  
** He shouldn't be.

Past performance, future results, each taking different sides of him, pull him apart. He almost wants there to be a limit to it, to how much he can handle of the recurring motif of a neck-locked death, that finishes him off altogether, forces him to a breakdown, to merciless sobbing that shows in the spine. But there seems to be no end to how far it can stretch and spindle.

No end in sight in the flickering eternal.

 

 

He _has an infinitude more to face._

He _has forever awaiting him if_ he _falls._

We _have one more chance to make_ our _life what he yearns for it to be..._

 _...though_ he _does not know me yet._


End file.
